I don't think anyone knows except maybe Noah Cross. Anyway, point is, I want the big cities in this campaign to be big and mysterious and noiry and, perhaps, in that way, unlike real medieval cities.

In the mind and in books and movies, the noir city is more like a dungeon than a mapped thing in a tour book--it's an amorphous dark space through which the characters grope and carve their way. It's a romantic rather than a classical approach to the city.

Plus, like I've said before, I don't want to world-build a lot of stuff I'll never use. So I'm writing some "urbancrawl" rules so that I can build the city as the PCs explore it.

Urbancrawl Rules:

Once a place is explored, it's fixed on the map. Until then, though, anything the DM hasn't written is up for grabs.

Neighborhoods

Above is a neighborhood map of Vornheim. It was achieved by writing out numbers one through ten in different colored markers. Pretty much randomly.

So far, as you can see, Vornheim has 10 neighborhoods, which is about a third as many as LA or Manhattan and about twice as many as Fritz Lieber appeared to need to write all the Lankhmar stories.

It doesn't show the actual shape of the city, just where neighborhoods are relative to each other and where the major streets and bridges are (Vornheim has building-to-building bridges everywhere--like Sharn in the Eberron setting and many previous pulp sci-fi cities, but for these rules, the bridges aren't necessary). For example, the fastest route from neighborhood ten to neighborhood four is via neighborhoods five or six, though you could go 10-9-2-1-4 if there was a giant lizard eating neighborhoods 5 and 6 or something.

Unique Buildings

Certain kinds of buildings there just isn't that many of even in a big medieval city. Like, Vornheim has:

If, in the middle of an adventure, the PCs suddenly need to know where one of these things is, or find some other unique place, roll a d10. That's what neighborhood it's in.

Getting From Neighborhood To Neighborhood

The major thoroughfares roughly match all the lines in the words spelling out the numbers in the neighborhood map. i.e. to get from neighborhood ten to neighborhood seven the PCs need to walk across a big "x" shaped intersection and if you flew in a dirigible over neighborhood six you'd see that the major streets spelled out the word "six".

(This is just the default street map for if a neighborhood is improvised during play. You always have the option of getting off your ass and mapping more realistic streets in any part of town, as long as the PCs haven't been through it yet. Plus if you count the bridges, there's several "layers" of connecting streets.)

Walking from one neighborhood to the next isn't that hard if the PCs know where they're going and it's daytime.

If it's not daytime, the DM may roll once on the Who Are You And Why Are You In My Way Table (Vornheim)(below)(Or any other random urban encounter table) once for each neighborhood the PCs travel through on their way to wherever they're going.

If they don't know where they're going, they can ask a random stranger for directions. Roll a charisma check. Success means they get where they're going. If they fail, the stranger isn't charmed enough to give conscientious directions, consult the following chart:

Fail by 1: You're lost, roll d10 to see what area you ended up in.
Fail by 2: You're in a dark alley, there's a thief trying to pick your pocket.
by 3: ...make that several thieves.
by 4: Refuses to give directions.
by 5: Refuses and is offended.
by 6: Person you're asking attacks you.

Non-Unique Buildings

Some stuff is everywhere. Assume every neighborhood contains at least one of the kinds of buildings listed in the table below under "Random Individual Buildings". (This is probably unrealistic, like is there really a jeweller in every neighborhood? No. Is there only one? No. But in a pinch, it'll do.) This way if the PCs go--"We need the nearest cheesemaker, stat!" you just use the "Travel Within A Neighborhood" rules.

Travel Within A Neighborhood

Once the PCs are in the same neighborhood as whatever they're looking for, if the DM is lazy and hasn't mapped that neighborhood yet, s/he rolls a d10. The streets between the PC and his/her objective are shaped like whatever number comes up on the die. For example, if the PC comes into the neighborhood from the north and the DM rolls a "1" then the map to wherever the PC is going looks like this:
If it's in the middle of a pleasant and sunny day then the DM shows them this (and makes up some street names) and everyone goes, Well, gee, that's nice to know, the PCs note that down and the DM draws it onto the map of the neighborhood and that's that. (The streets aren't shaped like numbers--the segment of their journey that lies between them and their goal is. And often, it'll only be shaped like part of a number--in this case, the right half. Just add on extra side streets so they don't realize you're doing this.)

However, if the PCs run out of arrows durring a goblin invasion and desperately need arrows and want to find the nearest arrowsmith, then the DM doesn't show the PCs this little "1"-shaped map and watches them run around on it trying to find what they need.

If the PCs take a wrong turn and unwittingly run off the edge of the "1" into an unknown zone, simply roll d10 again for the layout of the streets they just ran onto.

Over time, once the PCs have been a few places in a neighborhood, the "known streets" of the neighborhood might look like this:

And the DM can flesh out the neighborhood at will and throw in "decoy" streets to disguise the scheme--it's easy, numbers are just straight lines and circles.
That's the same neighborhood after 5 seconds of extra streets.

All this is more complicated if you take into account the bridges, but for the sake of a single day's adventure this should do you. If a PC is on a bridge and gets knocked off to a lower "level" and doesn't climb back up, just start the process all over again on the lower city level.

Random Individual Buildings

If the PCs run into-, or just happen to be looking at-, a random building, roll d100 to determine what it is:

If a PC enters an unmapped bulding, roll d6. The layout of rooms on a given floor will roughly match the layout of dots on a standard casino d6, i.e.:
If it becomes relevant, roll 2d6 to determine number of floors (in Vornheim, anyway, for a more realistic city, roll a smaller die).

Each floor can be laid out the same or differently, depending on how frantic the pace of the game is.

(For major buildings, just roll more dice and put the layouts next to each other. Or just be slightly less of a slacker and have a few of those generic church/castle/great hall layouts printed out.)

Pubs, Inns, and Other Commercial Establishments

Have four short pub descriptions locked and loaded before any urbancrawl session. (i.e. "quietest pub in town, red curtains, drunk painter eating sausage at counter, pick-pocketable for 2d6 g.p., waitress is 9th-level anti-paladin, rooms are cheap"). If the PCs enter a pub or inn roll d4 to determine which one they walked into. If your PCs enter more than four pubs in one session then, well, God help you.

Likewise, write short descriptions for four generic local merchants, i.e. "takes forever, expensive, but has valuable information about last NPC party met" and do the same with them.

Random Schmuck Table

If the PCs accost someone and you want it to be interesting, roll on the Who Are You and Why Are You In My Way Table. If they accost somebody and you just want it to be some random loser, roll below or on the WFRP career table if you've got that:

20 comments:

I'm not sure about the streets actually being shaped like numbers, because I have this feeling that as soon as the players see that, it will chuck them out of the game. Everything else is pure gold, though, and I'd be stealing it in a shot if I were running this sort of game!

Great ideas! I have to agree with the other comments of "consider it adopted". I vaguely remember something similar as far as the tables(CSIO or the Thieves World boxed set from Chaosium) but the ideas behind the street layouts are brilliant.

This is all excellent, excellent, excellent. Number 82 in the Random Schmuck Table reminds me of how Terry Jones wanted the last scene in Lucas/Henson's LABYRINTH to play out, with the David Bowie character actually being a nasty snivelling Muppetish goblin in a huge mechanical sawdust-and-wax-David-Bowie-costume.

And, speaking of silly, the ultimate festering-in-its-own-immensity fantasy city is Ahnk-Morpok in the DISCWORLD books, but again, be careful - VERY silly. So silly it's hard to read many of 'em at all, I've found.

Vornheim is totally my favorite supplement ever (for any system) (although, once I finish Veins of the Earth, it might change or it might not).

The urbancrawl sules is, perhaps, the best thing in the book, but looking at the maps is sometimes funny because my brains can't see streets and alleys all the time, it sees written words (ONE, TWO). It doesn't matter because a referee must meta-think tu run the game, so it doesn't matter; also it doesn't matter if players read numbers, because since they know they are not actually elves killing actual goblins, knowing these are not realistic maps doesn't change anything.

Still, I thought about a little different way to do it: write ONE, TWO, THREE, but each letter is disordered like in a sigil, only the word won't be changed until it becomes a symbols because that takes long time, you only change the structure of the letters and word, like in this example: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_3gWhL6x0aBRlNiWWdUT3p0UjQ